Moreish fiction; the most addictive page-turners to chomp through in one weekend or less

An addictive book is like a particularly tempting hunk of crumbly cheddar cheese.

We know we should step back and take time to covet it over a series of slow, delicious weeks. But we can rarely resist the urge to dive straight in and snaffle it down in one greedy - yet deeply satisfying - gulp.

We might even stay up all night to do it, just as we did when we were kids (we're talking more books now, rather than cheese... though that too).

Afterwards, we'll be struck by a slight giddy feeling of guilt, but it's not enough to stop us from doing exactly the same thing the next time a brilliant read hits our radar.

From fraught crime fiction to laugh-out-loud comedy, these are the not-so-heavy and compulsive reads we love to gobble down in one weekend or less.

Forget the books we think we should read; these are the ones we just can't stop reading, whether we want to or not.

Have we missed out your favourite addictive read? Let us know in the comments section below

A violent and terrifying incident on a beach in Nigeria seizes your attention in this tense masterpiece of a book, but it's only the beginning of a fateful sequence of events that will find you desperately backing the survival of an asylum seeker on the run in the UK.

Maggie O'Farrell certainly knows how to spin a good yarn. There are so many questions that keep us on tenterhooks here, not least - what is the dark secret that ties sisters Stella and Nina so closely together?

With a series of colliding events and childhood flashbacks, you have to constantly fight the urge to skip forward and find out how it all ends.